Monday, November 5, 2012

Vote.

Vote.

I don't care who you vote for.  I don't care if you vote Red, Blue, or Green.  I don't care if you vote Libertarian or Liberace.  Whig or Tory.  Communist, Socialist, or Stalinist.

I don't care if you've carefully weighed every issue on the table and averaged out your opinions accordingly, or if you've decided that repealing women's suffrage is your main issue and you're using your next-door neighbor as a write-in.

I don't care if you base your decision on whether Barack Obama or Paul Ryan is cuter. (Let's face it, neither Romney nor Biden are even competitors in that category.  Besides, Michelle is my number one gal.)

I don't care if you subscribe to Congressman Akin's gynecological "shut down in case of rape" theory, or the continuing implementation of 80-year-old New Deal-ish highway repainting ideas.

What I do care about is that the U.S. has a pretty low voter turnout.  The 2008 Presidential Elections, that cultural landmark year which showed a 58% turnout, had the highest percentage since Nixon won in 1968.  So that's basically a little more than half.  A little more than half of the country is willing to go out of their way during their lunch hour or on their way to or from work to help, in principle if not in actuality, decide who will be the next leader of our country.

I find that figure peculiar, since a lot more than half of the people I know have one thing or another to complain about if you bring up American politics in the right way.  Well, almost all of them.  Now this may be narrow-minded of me, and please tell me if you think I'm wrong here, but it's kind of like a carpenter volunteering to help his buddies build a house, refusing to do any work, and then complaining about the poor quality of work done without him.  Or like being invited to a party and asked to bring some beverages, only bringing a 6-pack of Zima, and then complaining that there's nothing good to drink.  In other words, if you don't care enough to help make a difference, how can you justify complaining?

Now I appreciate that there are plenty of issues out there that nobody in politics is addressing.  We have two main parties that win almost all of the votes, and if they don't care about your cause, nobody important will, so why bother voting at all?  And let's face it, politicians are competitors, not unlike athletes or poker players or the popular kids in high school.  They will break their promises, they will switch their loyalties, and they will win you over in the end, if not by doing what you want them to do, then by not totally disappointing you.  And let's not forget the futility of the landslide Red or Blue states.  So really, what's the point?

The point is that in this age of rapid-fire information barrages and spontaneous idea slipstreams, the odds are greater than ever before that your ideas will be heard.  If one person uploads a photo on Instagram or a video on Youtube, users, media outlets, and friends of friends of friends all over the world can catch the virus and see your work.  Information gets out.  Nothing happens in a bubble anymore.

Which means that your vote matters.  Your opinion will be heard.  The tipping point could be anywhere.  One lesbian somewhere could decide that her girlfriend looks like Justin Bieber, or one cat-owner could decide that his cat looks like Adolf Hitler.  That's how you get websites like lesbianswholooklikejustinbieber.tumblr.com or www.catsthatlooklikehitler.com which attract weirdly huge numbers of people every day.  It's just that easy.

The number of votes your candidate gets could be the difference between him or her trying harder next year or throwing in the towel and saying "Screw it all!"  You could be overheard saying something in the voting line or on the bus ride to the voting line, or simply be seen in the voting line wearing a particularly provocative pair of shoes, and that could change one person's mind, and he could change another's, and on and on.  The right person might hear you make a really cutting zinger about tax plans and all of a sudden, your private joke is a Huffington Post headline.

I think I've made my point.  In case it didn't come through clearly enough...

Vote.

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